A mortuary worker in Boulder, Colo., was so disgusted by an abortionist's bringing boxes of human remains to be incinerated that he secretly brought the remains to a Roman Catholic Church—which has been quietly burying them for years.

Now, the church plans to publicly bury the ashes of up to to 1,000 aborted children—and the abortionist is hopping mad, as the local CBS affiliate reports:

Dr. Warren Hern of the Boulder Abortion Clinic said his contract with Crist Mortuary required it to bury the ashes in its own plot.

Instead, he learned this week that for nearly a decade, a mortuary officer has been giving the remains to the Sacred Heart of Mary Church. The ashes are buried near a statue of Jesus and a memorial wall with plaques carrying messages from people wanting to memorialize their fetus.

"A lot of my patients come in with desired pregnancies, deeply saddened they have a desired pregnancy which is medically complicated or threatening their life," said Hern, one of a handful of doctors in the country who perform abortions late in pregnancy.

LaVelle said the Crist officer who gave the remains to the church began doing it in 1996, when he worked at a different funeral home. She said the man was "traumatized" when he opened a shipment of remains and saw recognizable human parts. He asked the church pastor what to do.

"The two of them decided it would be good to be able to honor these unborn babies by giving them a proper burial," she said....

The church in the fields southeast of Boulder has quietly held burial ceremonies for fetal remains from Hern's clinic since 1996....[LaVelle] said parishioners have known about the activity since 1998, two years before the wall was built.

For a year, church leaders considered inviting the public to the burials, LaVelle said. When the church recently received enough remains for the largest burial yet, they decided to announce a candlelight vigil Friday night and a burial ceremony after Sunday morning Mass.

The burial will represent 600 to 1,000 remains of aborted, stillborn and miscarried fetuses. LaVelle said the ceremony was never intended as a political statement, though it comes one day after the anniversary of the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe vs. Wade that legalized abortion.

"I have never met a woman that didn't agonize over this decision, and we are not judging that. If anything, we are saying we understand this was agonizing," LaVelle said. "Our society says it's something to be quiet about, so she carries that pain in silence. We want her to know that she doesn't have to do that, that we're here for her."

"I'm appalled that the Catholic Church will exploit women's private grief and misery for their own political purposes," he said. "Crist made a political statement by collaborating with this macabre ritual."

Kate Horle, spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, said it was unethical because neither Hern nor his patients knew of the burials.

"We certainly see this as a violation of the privacy of women," she said. "(The church and the mortuary) don't have a relationship with these women and they have no idea what their wishes or personal beliefs might be."